


Catch Me

by shadow_in_the_shade



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: F/M, Ficlet, angst with hopeful ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-15
Updated: 2016-10-15
Packaged: 2018-08-22 14:42:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8289464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadow_in_the_shade/pseuds/shadow_in_the_shade
Summary: “I’ll kill you,” he says, and the words resonate around their shared headspace and they hear its every echo falling back into the past, and it’s a spit in the face he knows he deserves when she snarls at him before she runs –“You’ll have to catch me first”.And she still never runs so fast he cannot catch her, and he knows she will let herself be caught just as she knows he will not kill her when he does.Milathos mini - fic.





	

“Catch me,” she laughs, and she runs with wind in her feet and mischief in her eye, but she never runs so fast he cannot follow or with any intention of him not catching her at the end. The chase is never about her getting away, not really and they both know it.

He cannot describe how it makes him feel. There are no words powerful enough or wonderful enough. He feels like a god, a hunter chasing down a storm in a fight he knows he will always win, that he is meant to win. He feels indestructible, immortal, with the sun on his face and the wind against him and her voice and her laugh like crystals blowing back into his face on the breeze.

It is a game and not quite a game as well, and they play it constantly.

“You cannot,” she says, looking at him from her back in their bed with mock horror dancing in her eyes, and it is midday and this is luxury and there is no reason in the world to imagine it as anything other than an eternal state of being – “You cannot possibly be ready again already?” But he is and he laughs and blushes – she falls in love with him every time he blushes like that – and is barely ashamed really, not at all, for the only thing that really seems impossible to him would be not to want her. It feels like more than arousal, more than lust, it feels primal and urgent and vital as breathing and he knows in these moments, as everyone knows, that nobody has ever loved like this; nobody could want anything as much as he wants this and it is all her, all of it.

“Well then,” she says – “You’ll have to catch me first,” and she runs, still in little more than her under things, out of the house and out of the grounds, leading him a merry chase through the fields of his estate and he has no shame, not when he has her instead.

It seems as though they are always laughing, running, falling together. He will catch that glint in her eye and she might say something just on the border of too shocking for a lady to utter and he will laugh and say –

“Terrible, shocking, I’ll kill you,” and she will laugh in his face and kiss him quick as a leaf brushing his cheek – “You’ll have to catch me first,” and runs. _This is me,_ she thinks, running, skirts in her hands, _less in flight now than I have ever been, I like this me,_ and she prays as she has never prayed before, not on her knees but with the wind in her face _dear god make this me last forever, let us keep this, make me myself now_.

And sometimes he is the “Beast –” she whispers – “You’re terrible. I’ll escape.”

“I’ll kill you,” he laughs; it has become a ritual joke now, the words beginning to form a pattern to stretch throughout the whole of their married life; something they will still laugh to each other when they get old.

“You’ll have to catch me first,” she grins with the summer caught between her teeth, and they know the summer will never end, that when they have devoured it down to the bones it will return again next year as bright as ever before.

But next year never comes.

-x-

“I’ll kill you,” he says with his sword at her throat, and she wonders when this refrain will ever end, if he really cares enough about whoever she has just killed this time to make this all worth it.

He cannot describe how it makes him feel. There are no words powerful enough or awful enough. He remembers feeling something once. He remembers worst of all how she used to make him feel. _Yes,_ he thinks, _we were angels once, the whole world was ours and there was nobody else in it_. He usually keeps himself from such thoughts but he cannot, not in the face of those accusing green eyes, that agonised mocking smile on her face. _The world was our toy and look what we did with it._ And here they are, stuck in this hellish afterlife unable to stop their childish fighting over which of them exactly broke the world.

 _This is what we get,_ he thinks; _what we deserve._ He does not know which of them is worse any more; he fears it may be him and fears it may be her. He cannot face the words _I loved you once_ and neither of them can bring themselves to _I love you still._ It chokes his throat like tar and he cannot make himself sick enough to bring that up however much he drinks. She cannot destroy the ghost of Anne no matter who she kills, and when she cannot bring herself to kill him she tells herself she cannot imagine why not.

They have always treaded familiar circles, re-painted familiar patterns over and over again, stuck in this Sisyphean landscape that neither is willing to leave for fear of severing their only last ties to the dream of a normal life.

“I’ll kill you,” he says, and the words resonate around their shared headspace and they hear its every echo falling back into the past, and it’s a spit in the face he knows he deserves when she snarls at him before she runs –

“You’ll have to catch me first”.

And she still never runs so fast he cannot catch her, and he knows she will let herself be caught just as she knows he will not kill her when he does.

-x-

It takes them both years to accept that just because the summer will never come again it does not mean autumn cannot be beautiful. It is tentative, this new love that is not new at all, timorous and fragile in its hope and attempt at life, but it is the best they have known in years. The briefest fight – and they are sometimes more than brief – threatens to topple everything they have built over in seconds every time, but they pick up, they go on. They waver precariously close towards those old patterns constantly, never quite daring to give them voice or fall into those old steps that would be too reminiscent of perfect happiness. They have threatened to kill each other both too many times for the joke that it once was to be safe.

Then one day in late August, they run inside on the back of a rainstorm laughing and shielding each other with delicious inadequacy from the rain. He pushes her into the door the instant it is closed, falling on her lips with the same need that is more than need; that is more than anyone else in the world has ever felt, the same hunger that has ridden him since the day he first saw her and that no amount of feasting will satisfy. He breaks off gasping for breath, shuddering like a boy underneath this lust, and her eyes are black and bright, raindrops glittering in her eyelashes and _when,_ he wonders, _did she turn back into the girl I knew?_ One day soon he will say it out loud and she will tell him that she never really stopped and only then will she know that it is the truth of it. This time he says –

“How do you still do this to me after so long?” and she smiles, feeling him hard and breathless, shaking and urgent all at once and she grins and strokes his need, tightens the finger of her other hand around his arm;

“Badness,” she whispers, licking her lips as she speaks in a way he cannot fail to notice – “It was always my badness.”

“Monstrous,” he half grunts, half laughs – “I’ll kill you.” The words are out before he knows he was going to say them and though his heart stops instantly, she is not quite so quick to remember, to factor in all the years of awkwardness and misery and she twists laughing out of his arms, licking her reply into his ear –

“You’ll have to catch me first.”

And only when her reply is out, and he catches her instantly by the wrist, holding her tight before she can run does she realise and they stare at each other for a moment petrified with terror and nostalgia and hope. The moment goes on for so long they both have to take in a deep breath of the same air not to die from it, and when they breathe again she smiles and he smiles, and they know. They know that they have finally stopped running and can play the game of running again.

__x__


End file.
